Did they really say that?

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Reflections by: Steve Perisho, Theological Librarian

I don’t know what this says about my choice in “friends,” but my Facebook feed feels sometimes like little more than a molten flow of inflammatory lies and half-truths. The user-friendliness of this medium allows individuals to broadcast their second-hand opinions with the click of a button.  And because a picture is supposedly worth more than a thousand words, this often takes the form of an interminable stream of images or “memes.”  Combine a picture with words, attribute them to a person much more famous than yourself, and your friends will sit up, take notice, and share.  Combine them with a picture of the celebrity, and you’re home free, even if the celebrity is long gone and didn’t even say what she or he is supposed to have said.  With the 500th anniversary of the Reformation at hand, Protestants especially  have been particularly prone to harkening back to the Reformers, using “their” words to make a point. This one, for example (whose accuracy is examined here), has been wielded at both ends of the theological spectrum on more than one issue:

And the following one has been making the rounds more recently, both with a typo and without (not to mention a variety of photographs). Popularized by a best-selling evangelical biographer who has never, to my knowledge, produced a source in Bonhoeffer himself (who was, admittedly, not a Reformer), it, too, is an equal opportunity (and of course temperature-raising) troop-rallyer:

Luther’s sidekick Philipp Melanchthon, known—in an age of vitriol comparable to our own—for his cool-headedness, was right: “The truth,” he said at the Leipzig Disputation of 1519, “might fare better at a lower temperature.”

Or did he?  Could this, too, be closer to a misleading Facebook meme than to what Melanchthon actually said?

The “translation” of Melanchthon’s words is Roland Bainton’s. It derives from his famous biography of Martin Luther, Here I Stand, published to thunderclaps of acclaim in 1950.  There Bainton summarizes the opening maneuvers of the Leipzig Disputation as follows:

In the afternoon began the preliminary skirmish over the rules of the tournament.  The first question was whether to have stenographers.  Eck said no, because taking them into account would chill the passionate heat of the debate.  “The truth might fare better at a lower temperature,” commented Melanchthon.

Unfortunately, my attempts to track this famous (and admittedly wonderful) saying back into the sources themselves have so far failed. Bainton did not specify his source, and the German specialists on the Leipzig Disputation whom I’ve queried so far have not been forthcoming.

Specialists on Melanchthon usually cite as a source for this the post-Disputation letter of Melanchthon to Johannes Oecolampadius dated 21 July 1519. But they tend to drop the quotation marks that Bainton availed himself of, and for an obvious reason: in that letter, at least, we find the sentiment, but nothing nearly so memorable, not even the word “truth”.  Barring the emergence of the very source that Bainton neglected to cite, we are forced to conclude that the quip should probably be attributed to Bainton (1894–1984), not the much more famous Melanchthon (1497–1560).

Bainton is of course right.  “The truth [really] might fare better at a lower temperature.”  That is a word that Christians wishing to speak into our molten socio-political climate would do well to heed. But above all we need the truth. And the habit of truth-telling starts small. With even the images and quotations we sling about, in fact. Let’s be careful about what we share and post, mindful of the accuracy of the words and images we use.

Steve Perisho is Librarian for Theology and Philosophy at Seattle Pacific University and blogger at Liber locorum communium

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